Speaker Distance-Amplitude Compensation The ability to specify the individual speaker distance from the center of the listening area, allows decoding for speaker array configurations where the speakers are not equally distanced from the center of the listening area. With the currently available decoder plug-ins, if a speaker is moved away from the speaker array perimeter, the user must adjust the volume slider of the moved speaker to compensate for the volume change caused by the distance moved.

The plug-in allows the user to set the speaker's distance from the center only, and the volume is automatically adjusted by the plug-in. If the volume of a speaker reaches the maximum, and its distance setting is further increased, the volume will not be increased. Instead the volume for all the other channels will be decreased accordingly. This prevents amplifiers and speakers from distorting, while maintaining an accurately volume balanced speaker array.

The distance sliders have a range of 0 to 10 meters with the default being 5. While the distance sliders affect the volume sliders, the volumes sliders do not affect the distance sliders.

Fully Adjustable Order-Balance Per Speaker One way of implementing per-speaker order control, would be to add a slider for every speaker, with a range of zero to three. The slider would only be able to select values 0, 1, 2, or 3. If the user selected 2 for 2nd order then the variables for the third order processing of that channel would be set to zero. As a result processing would only include the channels of the zero, first, and second order of spherical harmonics.

However a second approach, and the one which was implemented is to add four sliders for all individual speakers, that control the order balance of each speaker. The sliders control the percentage of the zeroth, first, second, and third base. The user can now control the orders on a per speaker basis.